LAM/MPI 6.5 released

[Jeff Squyres]

The LAM Team of the Laboratory for Scientific Computing at the University
of Notre Dame is pleased to announce the release of LAM/MPI version 6.5.

The software package can be downloaded from LAM/MPI's new web site (please
update your bookmarks and links accordingly):

		       http://www.lam-mpi.org/

LAM/MPI is a portable, open source implementation of the Message Passing
Interface (MPI) standard.  It contains a full implementation of the MPI-1
standard and much of the MPI-2 standard.

LAM/MPI's features include:

- Persistent run-time environment for fast user program startup and
  guaranteed termination and cleanup of resources
- High-performance message passing, including combined shared
  memory/TCP message passing engines
- Extensive debugging tools
- Much of the MPI-2 standard, including:
  - support for basic one-sided functionality
  - full implementation of dynamic processes
  - handle conversion between Fortran and C
  - new attribute access functions on communicators, datatypes, and
    windows
  - new datatypes
  - support for many parallel I/O features
  - C++ bindings for MPI-1 functions

New features in LAM/MPI 6.5 include:

- Man pages for all MPI-1 and MPI-2 functions
- Made LAM aware of PBS so that the same user can have multiple LAM
  universes on the same host simultaneously
- New SMP-aware "mpirun" command line syntax and boot schema syntax
  for "lamboot"
- Added finer grain control via an MPI_Info key for MPI_COMM_SPAWN
- Shared library support on all platforms that GNU libtool supports
- Revamped the build process; now uses GNU automake
- Full support for VPATH builds
- The lamboot and recon commands are noticably faster
- New "lamhalt" command to quickly shut down the LAM run time environment
- New "lamnodes" command to retrieve hostnames from nX and cX nomenclature
- Added MPI_ALLOC_MEM and MPI_FREE_MEM, mainly in anticipation of
  Myrinet and VIA support
- Added "-s" option to lamboot to allow "rsh somenode lamboot -s
  hostfile" to allow rsh to terminate
- Expanded many error messages to be more descriptive and generally
  user-friendly
- Updated MPI 2 C++ bindings distribution
- Updated and patched ROMIO distribution
- Added syslog messages (for debugging) to the run-time environment on
  remote nodes
- Bug fixes

LAM/MPI supports portions of the Interoperable MPI (IMPI) standard in a
separate distribution -- the 6.4 series (also downloadable from the
LAM/MPI webs site).  It is expected that the IMPI extensions will
eventually merge into the 6.5 series.

XMPI 2.2 will not work with LAM/MPI 6.5.  A new version of XMPI will be
released soon that will include support for LAM 6.5.

The full source code for LAM/MPI is available for download.  Linux RPM's
for all three of LAM's message passing engines (pure TCP, combined
TCP/shared memory with spin locks, and combined TCP/shared member with
semaphores) are also available.

All downloads are available for download from LAM/MPI's new web site
(please updated your bookmarks and links accordingly):

		       http://www.lam-mpi.org/

A list of mirrors of this site is available at:

		   http://www.lam-mpi.org/mirrors/

The web site also contains details for CVS access to the LAM/MPI source
tree, FAQs, MPI and LAM/MPI tutorials, and generally lots of other
additional information.

With this release, the addresses of LAM/MPI's two mailing lists will be
changed to reflect the new address:

-- General user's mailing list
   lam at lam-mpi.org

This list is for questions, comments, suggestions, patches, and generally
anything related to LAM/MPI (in order to control spam, you must be a
subscriber in order to post to the list).  Web archives of the lists, as
well as individual and digest subscriptions are available.  See the
following URL for more information:

	       http://www.lam-mpi.org/MailArchives/lam

-- LAM/MPI announcement list
   lam-announce at lam-mpi.org

This is a low-volume list that the LAM Team uses to announce new versions
of LAM/MPI, important updates, etc.  Public posts are not allowed.  Web
archives of the lists, as well as individual and digest subscriptions are
available.  See the following URL for more information:

	   http://www.lam-mpi.org/MailArchives/lam-announce

Make today a LAM/MPI day!

{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} squyres at cse.nd.edu
{+} Perpetual Obsessive Notre Dame Student Craving Utter Madness
{+} "I came to ND for 4 years and ended up staying for a decade"